September 21, 2023, and today: Little has changed.
“Cairo Peace Summit Ends without a Joint Statement, Unveiling Differences on Gaza War”
More than ten months after the Gaza Strip war started, Palestinian discontent with the Arab world’s response to the conflict seems to be growing. The Palestinians’ common complaint: “Our Arab brothers have once again let us down and betrayed us.”
The Palestinian rage is directed mainly against the Arab heads of state and governments and not the Arab people. In the eyes of the Palestinians, the Arab regimes are oppressing their own people and keeping them from fighting alongside the Palestinians against Israel.
Since the start of the war, many Palestinians have taken to social media to criticize the Arab regimes for what they see as their indifference to the daily scenes of death and destruction in the Gaza Strip. Some Palestinians have even gone as far as to accuse the Arab regimes of working in tandem with the “Zionist enemy.”
In the past few days, several videos of Palestinians hurling insults at Arab countries and leaders have surfaced on social media.
In one of them, a Palestinian man who survived an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip, said: “We [the Palestinians] are paying the price for the [Arab] normalization with Israel. The Arabs are disgraceful. By God’s will, the Arab governments will one day pay the price.”
The assumption among many Palestinians is that the majority of the Arab countries do not want to jeopardize their relations with Israel and the United States to appease the Palestinians.
In a post on X, another Palestinian wrote: “We will never forget that Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, and the rest of the Arab states stood by doing nothing as Palestinians were massacred. Shame on them all.”
A large portion of the Palestinian resentment is directed towards the Arab mutab’in (normalizers), mainly Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, as well as Egypt and Jordan. Several Hamas leaders and spokespersons have publicly voiced disappointment with the Arab regimes.
Abu Obaida, spokesperson for the Hamas military wing, said in a statement a few weeks ago, “The impotence of the [Arabs] has become greater; their reluctance and letting down [the Palestinians] have become more severe and bitter.” According to Abu Obaida, “expelling an [Israeli] ambassador and severing ties with [the Israeli] enemy that is exterminating an Arab Muslim people has become a dream for a great nation that ruled the world’s nations for centuries.”
It’s no secret that one of the main objectives of the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack on Israel was to foil U.S. efforts to reach a normalization deal between Israel and some of the Arab countries, most notably Saudi Arabia. To the dismay of Hamas and other Palestinian groups, the Saudis since then haven’t given up on building ties with Israel.
No Reactions from Arab Regimes to Cut Ties with Israel
Some Palestinians were hoping that the war in the Gaza Strip would drive the Arab regimes that have diplomatic relations with Israel to cut off their ties with Israel or at least recall their ambassadors from Tel Aviv. That has not happened – much to the dismay of these Palestinians, who view the Arab inaction as a “betrayal.”
A large number of Palestinians indeed value the medical and humanitarian aid that some Arab countries are sending to the Gaza Strip. Yet, these Palestinians were hoping that their Arab brothers would, on the other hand, take drastic measures to halt the Israeli “aggression,” including severing diplomatic ties with Israel. The general feeling among many Palestinians is that the Arab leaders and governments are not interested in putting pressure on Israel to stop the war.
It is important to note that the Palestinians have previously expressed their disappointment with the Arab world for “abandoning” them. Similar sentiments were expressed during the first and second intifadas (uprisings), which erupted in 1987 and 2000, respectively. The Palestinians, in addition, have been highly critical of the Arab countries for their failure to fulfill pledges to give them financial support. At Arab summit meetings over the past three decades, the Arab heads of state promised hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinians. The Palestinians say they have seen only a tiny percentage of the promised aid.
